The Lady and the Peacock (11 page)

Though well into the monsoon season, August 26th dawned sunny and hot. Word of the event had spread across the city, and thousands camped outside the Shwedagon all night to secure a good place. Many tens of thousands more began arriving at dawn. It is a short ride from University Avenue to the shrine—the two addresses are about a mile apart to the north of the city center—and on a normal day it would not take fifteen minutes. But on this day the crowds were so huge that Suu's convoy, with a Jeep in front, herself in a Toyota Saloon and Michael and the boys in another car behind, could not even get close. “We couldn't get through the crowd,” said Nyo Ohn Myint. “Michael was in my car and it took
something like forty-five minutes because the street was so crowded.” They were forced to get down and walk the last few hundred yards, the road ahead of them cleared by students waving flags.

Nobody knows for sure how many people were gathered outside the Shwedagon pagoda that day. It is part of the reporter's informal training to gauge the rough size of a crowd, but massive exaggeration is common in many countries, especially when the meetings are of great political importance; equally massive under-reporting by the authorities is also common, for the same reason. But Win Tin, the veteran journalist and close associate of Suu, insists that his own estimate of the numbers was not distorted by his political views. He said:

In those days the population of Rangoon was about three million, and about one million attended the meeting on August 26th. The crowd stretched from the pagoda itself all the way to the market, the people were densely packed, so there might have been a million. It was my duty to inform the international press about the event, but when I sent the news to the BBC I said there might be 600,000 people. I didn't want to sound too boastful because when Ne Win held a meeting he only drew 100,000 or 200,000 people. So I didn't want to make too much of the amount.
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Faced with such an unprecedented throng, even her closest supporters did not know what to expect from their “big sister,” dwarfed on the stage by a stylized portrait of her father. Would she dry up? Would her courage fail this frightening test? Would this long-term expatriate, deeply learned in Burmese literature, be incomprehensible to ordinary people?

“As far as I knew she had never done any public speaking,” said Win Tin. “I knew that she could speak Burmese quite well, but we had some misgivings about whether she would be able to speak good Burmese on stage.”

The stage was packed with young people, many wearing yellow armbands; a line of young bodyguards wearing headbands sat or crouched watchfully at the edge. A famous film star called Htun Wai, a comfortable-looking figure in a lilac jacket and longyi, stepped to the microphone and introduced her with a vertical flourish of his arm: “Daw Aung San Suu Kyi!” He lowered the microphone six inches and moved to the side. She took his place center stage, her hands clasped over a folder of documents at her waist. And
without preliminaries, without hesitation and without even the ghost of a smile she began to speak, in a high, loud voice.

It has been said with some authority that she read her speech from a prepared text.
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Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor was she reciting parrot-fashion a text she had learned by heart. Instead she spoke spontaneously, without notes, but sticking to a tight and cogent argument; spoke, in other words, on her first real outing, like a seasoned politician.

“She spoke very good Burmese,” said Win Tin, “very fluent and very convincingly and very clear. For a normal person it is not so easy to talk to such a huge crowd, a sea of people. She was not reading, and she talked so wittily—something like Obama. We saw at once that she was a born leader: ‘a star is born,' something like that.”

“It was so direct and down to earth,” said Bertil Lintner. “Everyone was absolutely taken aback by that speech. Here was this tiny woman talking and everyone was spellbound. It was amazing. She looked like her father and she sounded like him too.”
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The crowd stretched away into the monsoon haze, a sea of dark heads. Close to the stage it was slashed by a broad wedge of maroon: hundreds of monks, shielding their shaved pates from the sun with their robes. “The attendance was so big,” remembered Win Tin. “Never had so many people come together for a political meeting.”

How would this chit of a girl—to judge by her appearance—begin? By regurgitating the consultative committee proposal she had launched ten days before, to no avail? By apologizing for her months of silence and absence? By bemoaning the killings and pleading with the people to return to the path of docility and obedience?

Anyone expecting this sort of thing gravely underestimated the Bogyoke's daughter.

The very first words were like a cannon blast aimed at the regime's monopoly of power.

“Reverend monks and people!” she shouted. “This public rally is aimed at informing the whole world of the will of the people . . . Our purpose is to show that the entire people entertain the keenest desire for a multiparty system of government.”
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It was a broadside. Here, she declared, were the people—that was incontrovertible—and here and now the people were going to tell, not
merely the Burmese authorities but the “whole world”—the world from which she had returned, and which the regime had for a generation done everything in its power to exclude from its calculations—exactly what they wanted. She herself—she had no hesitation in claiming—was the people's mouthpiece. And what they wanted was not the cheese-paring referendum Dr. Maung Maung had announced just two days before, but something very clear. “I believe,” she went on, “that all the people who have assembled here have without exception come with the unshakeable desire to strive for and win a multiparty democratic system.”

What business did she, thirty years removed from the fray and married to an Englishman, have sticking her oar in Burmese waters? She addressed that issue, the one raised by the obscene posters, head on. “It is true that I have lived abroad,” she said. “It is also true that I am married to a foreigner. These facts have never interfered and will never interfere with or lessen my love and devotion for my country.” For the first time, two minutes into the speech, applause erupted; the actor Htun Wai at her side beamed and clapped, and Suu paused in her flow.

Love and devotion, however sincere, did not explain her presence on the stage. Unlike the democrats and communists who had spent the decades of one-party rule languishing in jail or fighting Ne Win's troops on the border, Aung San Suu Kyi had been far away from Burma and apparently uninterested in what was happening there. So what had brought her back? “The answer,” she said, “is that the present crisis is the concern of the entire nation. I could not as my father's daughter remain indifferent to all that was going on. This national crisis could in fact be called the second struggle for national independence.”

This was to step up the attack further. Here was a direct challenge to Ne Win: The standard-bearer of independence, the man who had for so long traded on his closeness to Aung San and who claimed to be his rightful heir, this man—she never named him—was now in her estimation no better than the colonial oppressor, to be resisted and evicted (so it was implied) like the British.

How could she justify such a call to arms? Now she raised the file clasped in her hands and leafed through it to read from a text written by her father. “We must make democracy the popular creed,” she read out. Otherwise, “Burma would one day, like Japan and Germany, be despised.”
Democracy, Aung San had declared and now her daughter repeated, was “the only ideology which is consistent with freedom . . . an ideology that promotes and strengthens peace.”

Deafening applause rolled across the stage. The expression on Htun Wai's face veered between elation and wonderment—with the odd flicker of fright as the speech's incendiary subtext sunk in.

But she had not finished with the army yet. At her secret meeting with the Justice Minister two days before, U Tin Aung Hein had enjoined Suu not to attack Number One, and not to incite the crowd to attack him. She had agreed, and she remained true to her undertaking—though perhaps not so true to the spirit of it.

“I would like to say one thing,” she went on, with the first hint of circumspection in her voice. “Some may not like what I am going to say. But I believe that my duty is to tell the people what I believe to be true. Therefore I shall speak my mind . . . At this time there is a certain amount of dissension between the people and the army . . .”

For the first time in the speech, Suu was open to the accusation of understatement: After all, staff at the hospital where her mother had once worked believed the army had killed 3,000 civilians in cold blood—a far greater massacre than any for which the former colonial ruler was blamed.
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She could not have been unaware that she was now trespassing on the most delicate and at the same time most vital question confronting the people: not what political system the country might adopt, which after all was a question for the coming weeks and months, but the nightmare of murder and mutilation that the country was living through right now, day after day. It could not be ignored.

And again her hands moved to the documents she had brought with her, leafing through to the words she needed. Again the great Aung San, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, pointed his dread finger at his sanguinary successor. “The armed forces are meant for this nation and this people,” she read out, “and it should be a force having the honor and respect of the people. If instead the armed forces should come to be hated by the people, then the aims with which this army has been built up would have been in vain.”

“My first impression was that she was just another general's daughter,” said Nita Yin Yin May, the British Embassy's information officer at the
time, “because I'd never met her personally. And then she started talking to the people and I was overwhelmed by her speech. I was shocked: This was the one we were looking for! She was the true leader!”
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She wiped away tears of emotion at the memory. “I was very much impressed. I thought she was very sincere, very charming, very beautiful, very outspoken. It really hit all of us. It really touched all of us. And then I decided, I'm going to support her no matter what.”

There was much more: The crowd listened with keen attention and by the end they were chanting her name. She told them of her “strong attachment” to the army, how soldiers had cared for her as a child. She vowed that she would never be a stalking horse for politicians of the past; echoing her father she exhorted the people over and over again to “unity” and “discipline.” She spelled out, naming the hapless Dr. Maung Maung (who was to survive in power for less than a month), her belief that a referendum was not required. “We want to get rid of the one-party system,” she said. There is “no desire at all for a referendum . . . free and fair elections [should be] arranged as quickly as possible . . .”

General Ne Win was of course not present at this meeting, and it is not known if he was subsequently given a recording of Aung San Suu Kyi's maiden speech; but if so it is a fair bet that by this point he had switched the machine off, possibly hurling it at the wall. Not only had Bogyoke's daughter come out of nowhere to make a nuisance of herself; not only did she bear a startling resemblance to the man honored as the father of the nation and of the Tatmadaw. But in pronouncing very particular words uttered by the dead man, she had ripped away what shreds of legitimacy Ne Win and his clique could still lay claim to. It was a declaration of war.

A silkscreen depicting Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi's father. It decorated the stage during her debut speech at the Shwedagon Pagoda and is now on a wall in her house.

I
T
is not true that recent Burmese history is an unending catalogue of oppression. Any Burmese over the age of thirty-five can remember a time of perfect liberty, when a free press flourished and trade unions and political parties sprang up like mushrooms after rain.

Unfortunately the Burma Spring lasted less than one month—twenty-six days to be precise. It ended as abruptly as it had begun.

Yet within that brief span in August and September 1988 Aung San Suu Kyi, backed by a shifting and so far nameless coalition of students, intellectuals, old politicians and veteran army officers, succeeded in persuading the regime to push through three reforms which ensured that Burma would never be the same again.

The first was what ushered in the spring, the decision by the Justice Minister to lift martial law—a prelude to and, in Suu's view, a basic precondition, for her public debut at the Shwedagon pagoda: She wanted the regime's assurance that nobody who came to listen to her would risk being shot. On August 24th, the request was granted.